The Dark Trinity (Book 1): Shuffle (15 page)

CHAPTER 19 
  ON THE RUN

“Bro… Hey...bro.”

“Dude, wake up man.”

The words seemed to bounce around Nathan’s head like a
racquetball. Someone spoke to him, but it sounded strange. It almost sounded
like Ronnie, but at the same time, sounded quite alien to him. Then he heard
what sounded like...crunching?

“Time to wake up, bro,” the voice said to him. It definitely
sounded like his friend, but it also sounded like his mouth was full. What
happened, why did he sound that way?

He couldn’t see anything. Slowly, he tried to open his
eyelids. Strange light flooded into his pupils and assaulted his brain. Blurry
images danced in front of him. The pictures began to sharpen into focus. There,
standing above him, was Ronnie. No, not Ronnie, but a grotesque facsimile of
his friend. The frightful face was gnawing on what appeared to be a rat.

Nathan sat up and screamed. At that same moment, unbearable
pain coursed through every fiber of his body, causing him to scream even more.
The cry which erupted from his throat sounded even more alien than Ronnie’s
voice. It almost sounded as if two separate people were screaming at the same
time, but at different frequencies. He would have been more curious about this
if it weren’t for the waves of pain surging through his muscles.

“Hey there brother, just take it easy,” Ronnie said, as he
finished gobbling down the rodent. He knelt down next to his friend and helped
him to his feet.

Nathan couldn’t take his eyes off his buddy. He looked so
different. He looked like... One of them. The thought of Ronnie as one of those
heartless creatures both saddened and sickened him.

“What happened? What’s going on? Did you slip me some acid or
something, everything looks weird?” He asked as he stood on painful, shaky
legs.

Ronnie laughed. “No man, you’re sober. But, uh, there’s something
you should know, bro.”

His expression changed. The laughter stopped and the smile
that was on his face a moment ago faded. Rat blood trickled down his chin.

“What is it?” Nathan asked. He realized that they stood on
the trolley tracks at the mouth of the subway tunnel.

Ronnie walked to the side of the tracks and picked up what
appeared to be a piece of broken mirror. He lifted the mirror up to his
friend’s face. Nathan peered into the cracked reflection in disbelief.
Blood-red eyes stared back at him. The face in the reflection was whiter than a
ghost, save for the trail of dried blood that ran down the front of the chin.
He raised his hands to his face, but stopped short once he saw the long talons
before him. Panic set in. He looked from the mirror to Ronnie, then back to the
mirror, hoping that this was some kind of hallucination.

“What the fuck happened to me!? What the fuck happened to
YOU!?”

“Just calm down bro, take it easy. It’s not as bad as you
think,” Ronnie replied.

“Not as bad as I think!? We’ve changed into fucking zombies
and I’m supposed to start singing Hakuna Matata? Jesus Christ Ronnie, what in
God’s name happened to us?"

“Honestly bro, I don’t think God had anything to do with this
shit. I was watching the shit hit the fan across the river when some old fucker
attacked me. I gave him a good beat down, but not before he got a good chunk of
my forearm. I guess that’s what did me in. Anyway, I headed towards the subway
station to meet you and there was a huge mob of creepy-crawlies outside. I
couldn’t get to you that way, so I had to backtrack, find where the subway came
out of town, and climb up the train trestle. I found you laying on the tracks
inside the tunnel. Looks like you managed to take a lot of them out, but they
fucked up your leg pretty bad.”

Nathan stood on the tracks and looked down the length of the
bridge ahead towards the South Side. Fires burned everywhere he looked. He had
to admit, he was impressed with Ronnie’s tenacity. It couldn’t have been easy
for his friend to find him. The memories of what had happened ebbed back into
his consciousness. Running from the Army/Navy store. The little zombie girl “Sunshine.”
The horde giving chase. Getting trapped in the subway platform. His leg ravaged
by creepers.

He looked down at his hands, now foreign appendages. They
hurt. The sudden change in physiology had caused pretty significant trauma to
his fingers. The area around the talons ached. Another wave of body pain washed
over him and he doubled over in agony. Ronnie moved towards the tunnel entrance
and returned a moment later carrying a squirming rat in his hand.

“Dude, you need to eat something. Here, take this,” he said
as he extended the wriggling animal.

“You’re high right now, aren’t you? I’m not going to eat that
rat.”

More pain. More searing, burning, overwhelming pain.

“Well, ummm, you don’t have a choice, bro. The reason you’re
in pain is because you’re hungry. Same thing happened to me after I woke up
dead. Trust me man, you definitely want to eat this. The pain only gets worse.”
Ronnie nudged Nathan in the arm and placed the rat into his hand. The rodent
squirmed and squealed.

Reluctantly, Nathan grabbed the vermin and stared at it for a
moment. Another wave of pain hit him, but this time it was stronger than
anything he had felt thus far. Before he could even think about it, his mouth
opened up, jaw distended, and his claws shoved the rat into his mouth. Blood
gushed as he began to chew his meal. Part of his brain gagged and vomited from
the thought of what he was doing, but the other part, the newer and larger
part, loved it. He consumed the rat on instinct. Soon, the pain subsided.

He stood there for a moment contemplating what he had just
done.
I just devoured a rat. I didn’t just eat it, I devoured it. I’m a
fucking monster.
He looked up at Ronnie, who now inched his way closer. He,
of course, was wearing a big ass grin on his face.

“Pretty messed up, huh bro?” the former hot dog vendor asked
with a chuckle.

“That’s the understatement of the century, my friend,” he
replied. Nathan had calmed somewhat, but the shock of discovering that he was
now a card-carrying member of the undead was just too much for his brain to
comprehend.
Brains. That’s pretty funny,
he laughed to himself.

Looking around, Nathan began to take in the scene around them
and the dire urgency of their situation began to sink in. They stood at the
mouth of the subway tunnel which lead into the city. In the opposite direction,
the tracks extended across the river to Station Square, which, was completely
engulfed in flames, chaos, and death. Both directions would be perilous and
after his attack in Steel Plaza, going back underground was the last thing he
wanted to do.

He looked down and inspected his ravaged leg and saw that it
had completely healed. There were no marks, scars, or any other evidence of the
injury on his bleached skin that he could tell. He moved his weaponized hands
over his body, inspecting as much as he could, trying to determine how inhuman
he had become. He was thankful that he hadn’t sprouted a barbed tail, so he
marked that in the “plus” column. He was equally happy to learn that he still
had hair, although it stuck straight out in all directions. It felt like
someone microwaved it for about twenty minutes.

“Hey, Ron-Star, what the hell happened to my hair?”

“Oh, yeah, about that... When you finally bit the bullet in
the tunnel, you collapsed on the tracks and started to fry on the third rail. I
guess they forgot to cut the power to the tracks. I got a pretty wicked jolt
trying to lift you off of them, so I had to wait until you shorted out the
line.”

Nathan stood there for a moment, looking at Ronnie
incredulously. At the least, his transformation had saved his life, sort of.

“Right, well the first thing we need to do is get off this
bridge.” Nathan began walking along the tracks towards the fire on the opposite
bank of the Monongahela River.

“Right behind ya brotha,” Ronnie said as he fell in step.

“So, how long have you been like this, man?” Nathan asked.

“Oh, long enough to know that it has its upsides. We’re able
to do all kinds of cool shit now.”

The two undead newborns began to make their way across the trestle,
while Ronnie explained their new abilities to Nathan. He covered everything he
knew; enhanced vision, improved strength and agility, as well as the hunger
aspect and the need to feed.

They had walked halfway across the trestle when they had to
stop. The military blew the bridges to prevent those in the city from escaping
the quarantine; a thirty foot span of the tracks were gone.  Twisted metal
writhed along the edges of the chasm, high above the river. The pair stood in
silence and stared at the newest obstacle before them. It struck Nathan as odd
that the military destroyed the bridges, since the calamity had started in the
South Side; outside the confines of Downtown. He supposed it was a move of desperation
on the military's part.

“Duuuuuude, this just isn’t our day!” Ronnie exclaimed as he
laughed and peered over the perilous edge.

“Really? Ya think so?” Nathan asked with an obvious air of
sarcasm. “We need to find a way across this. Backtracking through the tunnel
will only land us back in all that bullshit. Did you by chance grab those bags
I had with me when you pulled me out of the tunnel?”

“Nope. Was I supposed to?”

Nathan hated himself for not asking about the bags before
heading out over the bridge. The rappelling gear he managed to grab would've
got them across to the other side.

“How far inside the tunnel did you find me?” he asked.

“Aw not far at all. Maybe about fifty yards or so.”

“Okay, let’s go back and grab them. I’ve got some rope that
should work just fine.”

They turned from the ledge and headed back towards the
tunnel. Before long, they were back where they started. A few steps into the
cavernous entrance, complete darkness enveloped them. Nathan was still
adjusting to his new vision. Shadows looked different now; not as dark, although
he still couldn’t see well in the pitch black.

Ronnie seemed to be glowing red, but he knew that this was
the heat signature that his eyes were detecting. The eerie glow wasn’t real and
didn’t illuminate any of their surroundings.

They traveled deeper a few more yards, and then Nathan froze
in his tracks and grabbed his companion’s coat sleeve. Ronnie looked up at him
and followed his gaze into the depths of the passage. They saw the bags laying
on the tracks. Beyond the bags, deeper into the crepuscule of the subway, stood
a large shadow. It was impossible to determine the shape of the form, but they
could see two large, luminous eyes staring back at them. Heavy, guttural
breathing echoed off the tunnel walls.

“Is that another zombie?” Nathan whispered.

“No man, I don’t know what the fuck that is,” Ronnie
whispered back. “Its glow is all weird. Humans glow white, we glow red, and
that thing’s glowing like a greenish color. Plus, it’s like, not in focus or
something. I can’t tell how big it is or even what it is, can you?”

“No, I can’t.”

The thing in the dark took two steps closer, never taking its
silvery eyes off of them. The footsteps sounded strange as well, and they
sounded heavy. Whatever this was, it seemed pretty damn big.

Nathan took a cautious step backward; Ronnie did the same.
The creature didn’t move. It stood there, watching. Its eyes lowered to the
duffel bag on the ground before it and the back up to the now petrified
zombies.

“I think this thing is daring us to grab the bags, bro.”

Nathan, who still clutched Ronnie’s jacket, took another step
backward. “I don’t think we should test our luck with this.”

“I completely agree.”

Another step backward.

The dynamic duo stared straight ahead, hoping that their
shitty day wasn’t about to get any worse. The eyes that peered back fixated on
them.

Another step backward.

Another pause. Nathan couldn’t tell if his heart was
pounding, or if he still even had a heartbeat, but he was positive that he was
in a heightened state of awareness. He felt Ronnie’s tension. He could smell
the smoke from the South Side fires, but with all his new abilities, he
couldn’t sense what was ahead.

Another step backward.

“This thing isn’t getting any closer. Maybe we should try to
walk out of here...slowly,” Nathan suggested.

“I’m all for that, man.”

Another step backward. Then another. Twenty minutes later,
they were at the edge of the entrance. The bodiless eyes were faint, but still
present. The two turned towards the bridge and walked; never taking their eyes off
of the phantom behind them.

When they reached about the halfway point between the tunnel
and the bridge gap, they finally had the nerve to turn their heads and look
where they were going. They also began to walk faster. Neither knew what they
were going to do once they reached the edge, but they knew that they wanted to
be as far away from that tunnel as possible.